Hanan Alazaz is a PhD candidate at Lancaster University and Lecturer of Fiction at Princess Norah University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. She is currently researching the representation of the rejection of motherhood in postwar American novel.
Simon Bacon was co-editor of Undead Memory: Vampires and Human Memory in Popular Culture (Bern: Peter Lang, 2014) and is also co-editor of Little Horrors: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Anomalous Children and the Construction of Monstrosity (Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, Forthcoming). He is currently working on a monograph Becoming Vampire: Difference and the Vampiric Future in Popular Culture (Bern: Peter Lang, Forthcoming).
Melissa Bianchi is a PhD candidate in the University of Florida’s Department of English. Her research interests include media studies, game studies, posthumanism, animal studies, ecocriticism, and cultural studies. She has a forthcoming essay in Madness in the Woods and articles appearing in Green Letters (2014) and Computer Games and Technical Communication (2014). Melissa’s dissertation argues for critical engagement with the representation and simulation of human-animal relations in video games. She also teaches undergraduate composition courses at UF about special topics including digital games, animal studies, and visual culture.
Abigail Boucher is an early-career researcher at the University of Glasgow, where she recently completed her PhD in English literature. Her current research, which is in the proposal stage as a monograph, focuses on medical and scientific representations of the aristocratic body in popular fiction of the long nineteenth century. She has been published in Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies and Nineteenth-Century Contexts. Previous research of interest has been on legal philosophy in the works of Wilkie Collins.
Andrew Dean holds PhDs in both the natural and social sciences and carries out research spanning both sets of disciplines. He is particularly interested in the use of linguistics to unpick and elucidate how individuals construct themselves and the world around them. At present, Andrew is examining these discursive constructions for purchasing practices related to high technology, political extremism and identity work.
Silvia Dean has a background in history and the natural sciences, with a PhD in law examining the socio-linguistic construction of nanotechnology regulation in the EU. Combining several research paradigms and underpinning philosophies, Sylvia is examining highly complex phenomena, such as ‘otherworldly’ discourses related to how individuals construct themselves.
Val Derbyshire is a PhD candidate at the University of Sheffield, studying the evocation of place and space within the works of eighteenth-century novelist and poet Charlotte Turner Smith (1749-1806). Val also has an interest in the romance genre generally, from the eighteenth century up to and including contemporary fiction. This also embraces a lifelong love affair with Harlequin Mills & Boon romances.
Jaquelin Elliott is a PhD student at the University of Florida. She is currently sub-concentrating in Victorian studies and genre studies and has given conference presentations at the South Atlantic MLA, South Central MLA, Children’s Literature Association, and the International Gothic Association. Her academic interests include horror, the Gothic, cultural studies, fan studies, queer theory, and spending far too much time talking about monsters.
Kaja Franck is a third year PhD student at the University of Hertfordshire. Her thesis looks at the werewolf in literature as a creature of the ecoGothic. It concentrates on the relationship between wilderness, wolves and werewolves and how language is used to demarcate animal alterity. She co-organised the Company of Wolves conference in September 2015 which looked at werewolves, shapeshifters and feral children in literary and cultural narratives.
Richard J. Hand is Professor of Media Practice and Head of Media, Film and Television Studies at the University of East Anglia, UK. He was, until 2016, Professor of Theatre and Media Drama the University of South Wales. He is the founding co-editor of the international peer-reviewed Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance and his interests include interdisciplinarity in performance (with a particular interest in historical forms of popular culture, especially horror) using critical and practical research methodologies. He is the co-author of three books on Grand-Guignol horror theatre (Exeter University Press, 2002, 2007 and 2016), two books on horror radio (McFarland 2006 and Manchester University Press 2014), and numerous works on adaptation. As a practitioner he has written and directed productions in the UK and US.
Janine Hatter is an early-career researcher whose research interests centre on nineteenth-century literature, art and culture, with particular emphasis on popular fiction. She has published on Mary Braddon, Bram Stoker, the theatre and identity, the short story as a genre, and Victorian women’ s life writing, as well as on her wider research interests of nineteenth to twenty-first century Science Fiction and the Gothic.
Lindsay Katzir is a PhD Candidate in English Literature at Louisiana State University. She specializes in Victorian literature and culture, especially representations of ethnic and religious minorities in Victorian literature. Her dissertation, Inheritors of Israel: Identity, Race, and Nation in Victorian Anglo-Jewish Writings, examines auto-orientalist tendencies in works by nineteenth-century Anglo-Jewish writers.
Martin Lloyd is an aspiring literary and thriller author living in the north of England. He has an MA from King’s College London and publishes fiction at habitualscribe.wordpress.com.
Beth Mann has a first-class BA in Literature, and an MA in Creative Writing with Distinction from Bath Spa University, where she focused on ‘the writer and place’ and historical fiction. She also co-edited the MA’s 2013-14 student anthology, Beginnings. Myth and folk tradition inform much of her writing, and she has a strong interest in the tales of the British Isles and Germany, in particular those relating to shifting identities. She is currently completing a novel set in early medieval Cumbria, which she began on her MA
Kevan Manwaring is a Creative Writing PhD candidate at the University of Leicester, writing a novel drawing upon the folklore and folk music of the Scottish Borders and Southern Appalachians. He is the author of several books including Desiring Dragons: Creativity, Imagination and the Writer’s Quest; The Bardic Handbook; Oxfordshire Folk Tales; Northamptonshire Folk Tales; The Windsmith Elegy series of novels; and the forthcoming Ballad Tales (editor). He is a Fellow of Hawthornden, the Higher Education Academy, and the Eccles Centre (British Library) and a consultant for BBC TV’s ‘The Secret Life of Books’. He blogs and tweets as the Bardic Academic. https://thebardicacademic.wordpress.com/
@bardicacademic
Melissa Purdue is an Associate Professor of English at Minnesota State University, Mankato. She has published New Woman Writers, Authority and the Body with Stacey Floyd (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), and a critical edition of Rosa Praed’s Fugitive Anne: A Romance of the Unexplored Bush (Valancourt, 2011). Her most recent publications have been in Domestic Fiction in Colonial Australia and New Zealand (Ed. by Tamara Wagner, Pickering & Chatto, 2014) and The Latchkey: Journal of New Woman Studies. She is also a founding Editor/ Co-Editor-in-Chief of Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies.